Nurses and midwives face the prospect of being banned from practising medicine in the United Kingdom if they “misgender” a patient, new guidance from a regulator has suggested.
Guidelines from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) regulator, which has the power to suspend or even remove nurses and midwives from its registry, effectively prohibiting them from working in the UK, has warned that “misgendering” a patient could lead to sanctions.
While it did not specifically lay out the penalty for failing to use a patient’s so-called preferred pronouns, the regulator stated according to the Daily Mail: “Persistently and deliberately misgendering a trans person is contrary to the requirements of the code to treat people with kindness and respect.
“Although gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act, this does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can ‘misgender’ trans persons with impunity.”
The updated guidance from the regulator has drawn concerns about the potential risks posed to patients by adhering to leftist gender theories, with Stella O’Malley the director of the medical campaign group Genspect saying: “Professionals, especially those working in healthcare where mis-sexing a person could have catastrophic implications, need to have the right to clarify and even highlight a person’s sex.
“For example, if a transman presents with stomach aches, the nurse might need to ascertain whether the transman, who is biologically female, could be pregnant,” she said, adding: “While a person’s gender identity might be important for some people’s sense of self, their biological sex can be a matter of life and death within a hospital setting.”
O’Malley went on to criticise the regulator for asserting that it is a “belief” that people can change their sex, saying: “This is akin to saying it is a ‘belief’ that water is wet… no person in the history of the world has changed sex – many have changed their gender identity but no one has changed sex.”
Defending the guidance, the executive director of strategy and insight for the NMC, Matthew McClelland said that it “is rooted in the law, and helps our colleagues to reach swift and fair decisions in fitness to practise cases.”
“It makes it clear that people have a right to freedom of expression and to protected beliefs but that there may be some circumstances when what a nurse, midwife, or nursing associate says, and importantly how they say it, could impact their fitness to practise,” he added.
The British medical establishment has long been at the forefront of the global transgender movement, however, there has been increasing pushback, in particular against offering so-called gender therapies to children.
The UK’s premier child transgender clinic, the Tavistock Centre in London, is set to be shut down this year after its practices were deemed to have failed to account for the safety of its patients. During its history, the clinic provided “treatment” to some 19,000 children since opening in 1999.
Tavistock has been accused by whistleblowers of attempting to push a political agenda rather than operating in the best interests of its patients, with former top staff revealing that children were often offered life-altering puberty-blocking drugs to children after as little as just one consultation. In addition to facing a mandated closure of its operations, Tavistock is also facing legal action from over 1,000 families who accuse the centre of misdiagnosing their children as transgender.
However, despite the planned closure of Tavistock, the UK’s socialised National Health Service (NHS) is planning on opening smaller gender clinics for children throughout the country, and will reportedly offer transgender treatments to children as young as seven years old.